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I just LOVE this year's Red Ribbon Week theme: iTune Out Drugs, Our School ROCKS Drug Free! In preparing for this fun week (which features days like "Heavy Metal Hair Day") we are decorating the school. There are guitars hung in the hall ways and musical banners hanging for everyone to see. I have a couple of bulletin boards up.

Steady beat is a skill that we work on at all grade levels. A fun activity that we do in third grade is called "Beat Leaders". Students work in groups of 4 or 5 and practice different ways to show steady beat. Clapping, patting, nodding, stomping, etc... are some basic ways to do this. These clever third graders used moves like flapping, poking and air punches to show the beat! This activity can be done anywhere. Just turn on some music. I like to piece instrumental pieces so that the words don't distract from find the beat.

Using a staff and a hand full of bottlecaps, students in Fourth Grade practiced reading pitches on the treble clef staff. This skill will be quite valuable when they start recorders in the spring. Working with partners, students created words with the musical alphabet (A B C D E F and G) and then their partner had to use the bottle caps to "spell" the word on the staff. Students plotted words like baggage, cafe, add, Gabe, bag and more.

Third and Fourth graders are great rhythm readers and even better rhythm song writers! In this activity students used their knowledge of note values to create rhythm patterns using body percussion. We used stomping, patsching, clapping and snapping in our songs.

Instead of using the traditional five lined staff, we used a four line staff. Each line represented one of the following: stomp, pat, clap or snap. Students then notated which body percussion element to use by writing the note on its line. Students created some fabulous songs! In the pictures above, students work with partners to create patterns and them perform them.